XN000022-1996-10-02 — Page 19

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Governor: Well, I can, let me take other areas of life. One could conceive of smooth transitions which led to extremely undesirable or unsuccessful outcomes. You could have a very smooth ride to hospital and never come back. What you actually want is a ride to hospital and a ride back again.

To come directly to what I mean in the context of Hong Kong, what is a successful transition? A successful transition, which we would all like to be as smooth as possible, is one which sees Hong Kong in two, five, 10 years time, doing even better than it's doing today with a free society living under the rule of law. That's a successful transition and let me make it perfectly clear that if we don't get a successful transition, if we don't have Hong Kong in that state in five years, 10 years time, people aren't just going to criticise Chinese officials, they're going to criticise departed British officials for not having done enough to guarantee Hong Kong's well-being. That's what people should have in mind when they think about the judgement of history.

One more. We've had 40 minutes, I think. I think the person who asked me my very first question after I'd become Governor of Hong Kong. Oriental Daily.

Question (Oriental Daily): Thank you Governor. Governor if history turns back and the clock turns back to your arrival, will you still go forward with your reform, political reform, or you would like to leave your way and depart Hong Kong with your frustration and anxiety as you stated in your policy address?

Governor: I'll say two things. First of all, when we had those fairly noisy arguments in '92,'93; when we had the Hang Seng Index plummeting four or five hundred points in a moming; when we had threats made to Hong Kong's economic prospects; the development of our infrastructure; when we had dire predictions of disaster from distinguished former diplomats; when all that happened, I'm bound to say, I felt very strongly that Hong Kong would manage to weather those occasional bouts of turbulence and the truth of the matter is, we did go through those arguments because I believe that it's important to do everything possible to stand up for Hong Kong and to try to implement the Joint Declaration. We did have those arguments and look at Hong Kong today. Is Hong Kong wrecked? Is our economy in tatters? Is our social fabric torn asunder? You know what the answers to those questions are. The statistics tell what we all know about Hong Kong's quality of life. Not that there aren't problems, not that there aren't other things we have to do. But that Hong Kong has done extremely well in the last four or five years.